Since his first appearance in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1968, more than a hundred and twenty of Josh Pachter‘s short crime stories have been published in the U.S. and internationally. He’s also the editor of two dozen anthologies, including Happiness Is a Warm Gun: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of the Beatles and Friend of the Devil: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of the Grateful Dead, and the translator of more than sixty novels, short stories, memoirs, and comic books from Dutch to English. His own first novel, Dutch Threat, came out in 2023 and was a finalist for the Agatha, Lefty, and Macavity awards. His latest publication is the children’s novel First Week Free at the Roomy Toilet, which will be published by Level Best Books on September 24.
What is your greatest fear?
Pre-pandemic, I watched two dear relatives—an aunt and uncle—descend into dementia. They lived less than half an hour from me in Northern Virginia, and I visited with them at least once a week during their final years. My uncle had spent his working life in the aerospace industry and my aunt had been a teacher, so they were thoughtful, intelligent people, and seeing them lose their ability to follow a train of thought, to form coherent sentences, to remember recent events—though she recalled her time at the Manhattan Project and he his WWII experiences as an aircraft navigator with crystal clarity to the very end—was sad and terrifying. One sharp memory I have is the day I showed up at their nursing home to find them lying side by side in bed, holding hands like teenagers … and my aunt looked up at me and asked, “Are you my husband?”
I can’t think of anything more frightening than losing my past to the ravages of Alzheimer’s or dementia, of lying helpless in bed and not recognizing my wife or my daughter. That’s the scariest thing I can conceive of.
Is there any fear you’ve overcome in your life?
As a child, I was petrified by heights, but I mastered the fear by forcing myself to go right to the edges of tall buildings, high cliffs overlooking the ocean, and the like.
In 1973, I was living with a girlfriend in Nevada, and we gave each other skydiving lessons for some occasion. We took a several-hour training course and then went up in a little plane for our first jump.
The idea that skydivers barrel out of the plane yelling “Geronimo!” comes from old war movies, but the reality is—or at least at that time was—very different. Novices did what was called a static-line jump, where your ripcord is attached to the plane and pulls itself once you’ve dropped a certain distance. As you approach the carefully manicured drop zone at a height of about three thousand feet, you climb out onto a strut jutting from the side of the plane and hold onto another strut just above eye level. Then, when the jumpmaster taps the back of your leg, your training kicks in: you let go of the upper strut, the plane keeps going forward, you head groundward, and the static line pulls your ripcord.
When it was my turn to climb onto the strut that day in 1973, I was completely frozen with fear. The only reason I didn’t chicken out was that my girlfriend had already jumped, and I was more afraid of looking like a wimp in her eyes than of going through with it. So, I took my turn … and once I was hanging under the parachute’s canopy, the descent was one of the most beautiful, peaceful experiences I’ve ever had.
Unfortunately, it turned out that the fricking jumpmaster got distracted and tapped me off the strut too late, which made it impossible for me to reach the manicured drop zone. Instead, I landed on hard Nevada desert and wracked up my knees so badly that I eventually needed to have them both replaced and didn’t ever jump again. But I’ll never forget the fear and magnificence of my one and only skydive.
“When it was my turn to climb onto the strut that day in 1973, I was completely frozen with fear.”
What person living today terrifies you the most?
I’m guessing that pretty much everyone answers this question the same way. The idea of a second Trump presidency is the most horrifying future I can imagine for America. I’m going to try to avoid swearing, here, and just say that he is a misogynistic, Islamophobic, LGBT-hating, corrupt, sociopathic criminal who belongs in the Big House, not the White House, and I pray that he winds up there. It’s also scary, though, to consider the rioting and bloodshed the Donald’s MAGAmob will inflict on our country if he were in fact to be incarcerated.
Have you ever had any paranormal experiences or premonitions?
I lived in Europe from 1979 through 1991. In the summer of 1986, a month after the birth of my daughter Rebecca (herself now a talented crime writer—look for Staying the Course, the third novel in her Mackenzie Wilson series, coming from Bella Books this fall!), her mother and I took her to Scotland for a vacation. Early one foggy morning, we parked beside Loch Ness, and I walked down to the lakeshore while Becca and her mother stayed in the car. Suddenly, a long gray neck and head emerged from the fog. It was clearly Nessie!
This was before cell phones, but I had a camera with me—in the car. I bolted back to get it, but by the time I returned to the shoreline, the apparition was gone.
I’ve never seen a ghost, an angel, or an alien—but I absolutely saw the Loch Ness monster!
Is there anything you are terrified of eating?
Sorry, Bonchon, but I’m scared to death of your chicken. When you opened a restaurant just up the street from Northern Virginia Community College’s Loudoun Campus, where I used to teach, I fell in love with the stuff and ate it at least once or twice a week. I’ve never been addicted to an actual drug, but I think I was addicted to that Bonchon chicken.
One afternoon, though, I had lunch there with my officemate, Lisa Nanni-Messegee, and we both wound up deathly ill. I’m sure it was just an anomaly, and something went wrong in the kitchen that one particular day … but I haven’t Bonchonned since, and neither has Lisa. I miss it, but I’m not ready to open myself up to being that sick again.
Do you enjoy scaring other people?
Seriously, Tara, are there people who say “yes” to this question? Do you enjoy scaring other people?
I do not. I like making other people laugh, and I like making them think (which is why I became a teacher), but I have no interest whatsoever in making them feel negative emotions, be they fear or sadness or even simply boredom.
What’s the scariest book you’ve ever read? Is there a particular scene that really haunts you still?
In the mid 1980s, while I was living in what was then still West Germany, I edited a series of anthologies for a Dutch publisher: Top Crime, Top Science Fiction, Top Fantasy, and Top Horror. For each volume, I approached some fifty of the best people then writing in the genre and asked them to send me what they considered to be the best or their favorite of their own stories.
For Top Horror, of course, I contacted Stephen King, and he sent me a story called “Survivor Type,” which remains to this day the most gruesome, stomach-turning piece of fiction I have ever read.
For the sake of completeness, I should tell you that I wrote King back and rejected the story. It was, I told him, absolutely horrifying, but it wasn’t really a horror story. He wrote me back, said he saw my point, included in the envelope three stories, and gave me his permission to pick one for inclusion in my anthology. Nope, I replied, that’s not the way this works. You have to choose. And he very graciously stuck with me and selected “The Cat from Hell,” which I included in the book. (Before you rush off looking for Top Horror, I’ll add that, though the other three volumes all had English-language editions, Top Horror was published only in Dutch and German. Sorry! But you can find “Survivor Type” in King’s 1985 collection Skeleton Crew and “The Cat from Hell” in various places, most recently his fifth story collection, Just After Sunset.)
People often say death is their greatest fear. What are your feelings about death/dying?
Death doesn’t scare me. I went through a period where I was reading a lot of “woo-woo” stuff—books about Zen Buddhism, Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan series, and especially many of Jane Roberts’ Seth books. According to the latter, Seth was “a consciousness not focused in physical reality” who used Jane as a channel for communication with our world. The way I figured it at the time, either Jane was a brilliant fiction writer, or she was completely insane … or there are in fact more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. Whichever of those three possibilities is the correct one, I came away from the Seth books not worried about dying. Either there’s another magnificent adventure awaiting me or there isn’t—and, either way, there’s no point fretting about it now, while I’m still able to enjoy this magnificent adventure.